[UPDATE: Book Bench cites only two examples of this trend: (1) Doug Lansky's The Titanic Awards (published by Perigee, as my book will be!) and (2) this May 2010 article in the New York Times, the lead paragraph of which does indeed say that this season’s most interesting travel books have gone into staycation mode. But when you read the article, this turns out to be 100 percent false. The books are indeed about people who stay in one place--but in every case, it's an exotic place to which they've moved. By that definition, staycation lit includes A Year in Provence and Driving Over Lemons and Under the Tuscan Sun and A Moveable Feast. This sort of book is nothing new, I promise, even if you're desperate to find the timely angle. Note to the New York Times: if you go to a far-off locale, if you journey away from the place that you call home, that is by definition not a staycation. ... In other words, I don't think we have a trend. Yet. I hope.]

My first book was Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day(Perigee Books/Penguin, 2012), a travel memoir about my attempt to tour Europe guided only by a 1963 copy of the guidebook Europe on Five Dollars a Day. This blog has its roots in that trip, and if you dig back to the 2009 archives, you'll find my posts from the road.

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Long live the handwritten letter!

I'm on a mission to keep handwritten letters and postcards alive. Write to me! I'll write back (eventually--be warned that I'm kind of slow).